CONNECTIONS

CONNECTIONS; How Jokes Guaranteed to Offend Teach Propriety Its Place

By Edward Rothstein

Published: July 8, 2000

Sigmund Freud, like Groucho, loved a good cigar. But he never met the Marx Brothers, which is just as well, because they might have treated him the way they did the poor producer Irving Thalberg, camping out in his office stark naked and roasting potatoes in his fireplace.

Freud did have some good ideas about jokes, though, and it might even be that Groucho's German Jewish grandfather, an itinerant entertainer, provided one of Freud's ancestors some amusement. For in Freud's brilliantly unfunny book ''Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,'' he keeps coming back to a popular genre of Jewish jokes about the ''shadchen,'' the matchmaker, a folk figure who will assure a suitor of anything to arrange a wedding. In one joke, a suitor protests: ''I don't care for the mother-in-law, she's disagreeable and stupid.''

''But you're not marrying the mother-in-law,'' the shadchen replies. ''What you want is her daughter.''

''Yes, but she's not young any longer and she's not exactly a beauty.''

''So? If she's neither young nor beautiful, she'll be even more faithful to you.''

''She also doesn't have much money.''

''Who's talking about money? Are you marrying money? It's a wife you want.''

''But she's got a hunchback!''

''Well, what do you want? She can't have a single fault?''

Admittedly, this joke would not have made the final cut in the Marx Brothers' movies scripted by S. J. Perelman or George S. Kaufman. But the genre came to mind anyway while reading two recent books: ''Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers,'' by Simon Louvish, and Stefan Kanfer's new biography, ''Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx.'' For Groucho has a touch of the shadchen in him.

Like Groucho, the shadchen is an operator, twisting logic to his own ends. Everyone knows he is not to be trusted, but it doesn't matter. He strips away the pretense behind social graces, revealing the ugly scaffolding, the same way the brothers do when they rip the set apart in ''A Night at the Opera.'' Everything is wrecked, but a match is made and the show goes on.

Here's Groucho at work:

''I love you, I love you,'' he passionately declares to Margaret Dumont's pompous character in ''Cocoanuts.''

''I don't think you'd love me if I were poor,'' she sagely replies.

''I might,'' he answers, ''but I'd keep my mouth shut.''

Groucho lecherously pursues money, status, power; he knows it, we know it. He mocks it, we mock it. Like the shadchen, he first seems to be making a simple match, linking a desire with its satisfaction. But then the trickery comes through. The match itself turns out to be a farce; so does the desire. ''Madam,'' he declares on another occasion, ''before I get through with you, you will have a clear case for divorce. And so will my wife.''

Freud suggests that while it might seem as if the shameless matchmaker is the butt of the shadchen joke, actually the respectable suitor is. The suitor crassly seeks perfection. The shadchen knows better. Perfection is not to be had. There's also a social function to his conniving: the suitor must be reconciled to the merely human. So when the matchmaker is forced to acknowledge all the distasteful bride's scars and flaws, that only strengthens his case. She can't have a single fault?

This was, in Freud's view, one of the functions of jokes themselves. They trick propriety to accept impropriety, slipping the unacceptable through the censors. The joke is itself a matchmaker; and the butt of the joke is the censorious suitor's demands for absolute perfection. You want beauty, riches, status? Ha! This is the way things are. And listen, I'm not so great either.

So Groucho is a crouching joke with a mustache, and like the shadchen (who never seems to be married), he can see what's going on because he is an outsider. He is Rufus T. Firefly, brought in as president of Freedonia by the bejeweled Mrs. Teasdale. He is Captain Spaulding, the African explorer/schnorrer who lands in the middle of Mrs. Rittenhouse's Long Island mansion. He is, in other words, a lot like the Marx Brothers and the other aspiring children of ethnic immigrants, who came, saw, mocked and conquered.

This may have been what vaudeville was all about: the alien is ridiculed, but so is the society carrying out the ridicule. Race and ethnicity may have been the biggest jokes on the vaudeville circuit. Groucho, in his youth, once played in a theater with the Wangdoodle Four, a group of black men dressed as Chinese. Groucho's Jewish uncle, Al Shean, presented himself as an Irishman in the duo Gallagher and Shean. And the brothers created their personas out of immigrant cliches. In ''Animal Crackers'' the brothers' foil is a Czech fish peddler, Abe Kabbible, who tries to pass for a sophisticated connoisseur. ''How did you get to be Roscoe W. Chandler?'' Chico challenges him. ''Say,'' he shoots back, ''how did you get to be an Italian?''

But unlike Abe Kabbible (who was modeled on the arriviste financier Otto Kahn), the Marx Brothers did not disguise their closeness to immigrant culture; they exaggerated it.

An Italian, a mute and a wisecracking Jew are set loose in high society and work havoc. Their success is a distinctively American joke. For as it turns out, Mrs. Rittenhouse and her clan are no match; and figures like Roscoe W. Chandler can claim no superiority. The Marx Brothers begin as aliens, but they are eventually at society's center, helping to redefine America with a popular culture shaped by ethnicity, race and immigration. Seventy years later, despite mothers-in-law and the shadchens' scheming, the match has held up remarkably well.